Borodin Road was short - a half-minute drive at the most - and I had reached the entrance.
Examining my mental state carefully, I concluded that it would be possible to drive to Berkeley only if I stayed aware of everything I was doing and everything all the other cars were doing. I sent a telegram to whatever might pass for a guardian angel, "Please keep me safe," and edged out into the traffic.
On the highway, I focused on what I knew was an absolute necessity for survival: driving carefully and paying attention. The stream of ideas and concepts were continuing, but muted now, like music playing on the radio with the volume turned down.
I noted, without surprise, that I seemed to be able to pick up the general mind-state of any driver in my vicinity. I was getting brief exposures to a succession of emotions: impatience, resignation, irritability and, in one case, an almost delirious happiness.
It occurred to me that I might be broadcasting my own psychic state quite strongly, and that it would be a good idea to practice some kind of shutting-down, if I could figure out how to do it.
After a while, I knew there wasn't going to be a problem; other drivers were occupied with their own thoughts, and no disturbed or curious glances were being directed at me. I began to feel less anxious, and finally concluded that, if I stopped extending my antennae to discover other people's feelings, and instead kept the focus on myself, my car and the road ahead, I would be minimizing my risks, both real and imagined.
I felt fear only once. Driving off the connecting ramp onto Shoreline highway, I saw in my rearview mirror a man at the wheel of a heavy, silver-colored American car in the lane to my left. He was driving fast, and his face wore an expression that was truly startling, a mixture of exaltation and malevolence. He was grinning to himself. As he passed me, I caught the impact of a shark-mind, strong and predatory. I glanced quickly at his profile, and away.
Keep castle walls strong and the drawbridge up. Don't make mental contact. That one's dangerous. Slow down a bit and let him get well ahead of you.
When he was finally out of sight, I became aware that I'd been holding my breath. I let it out slowly,
Oh, baby I What kind of human being is THAT?
It took me a while to shake off the clinging remnants of darkness which the silver car had left in its wake.
Twenty minutes later, I was knocking on the door of Adam's little house. He showed me in, and held me in the hug for which he was famous in our circle of friends, and undoubtedly well beyond it, a hug which always communicated energy and strength and a deep level of acceptance. I often told him that his was the most seductive hug in North America; it took all one's will-power to leave those encircling arms. He would chuckle and pat my cheek. Once, he said, "Well, I claim a good hug as one of my few remaining sensual privileges!"
I knew that, in truth, Adam used his hug the same way I used mine - not only to welcome, but to make contact with the core of the other person, to feel out the state of a friend's emotional and spiritual health. The information doesn't come through the arms; it is transmitted from one solar plexus to another, and a hug is the only socially acceptable way of coming that close to the body of someone who is not a lover.
I sat on his old brown leather couch and stayed silent while he did things to his tape-recorder on the low table in front of me. "All right," he said, finally, sitting back in his chair, "The tape's started. I'll give it to you when you leave. Now, tell me what's going on."
I started talking.
As I gave the highlights of the past few days' experiences, the tears welled up again. I apologized and explained that this went on all the time, and asked him not to pay attention.
He said, "All right, I won't."
Once, he interrupted me to say, "You know, there's no use your trying to make sense out of what you're experiencing, because any conclusions you come to will probably be wrong. Stop wasting time with theories. Just describe it."
"Okay," I answered, bewildered, because I didn't see how I could divorce myself from efforts to explain, comprehend, and give some kind of structure to all I'd been going through. Then I understood; he didn't want me using my intellect to control whatever turmoil I was feeling, thus risking repression of emotions which needed to be experienced and released.
Adam sat across the table from me, watching and listening. I concluded, "A lot of the stuff that's been happening has been really extraordinary - like the lucid dream, for instance - and if they were coming at me during a psychedelic experiment, I'd be fascinated and grateful, you know? But there's too much of the sad, painful aspects of existence running through my mind, and worst of all, moments of feeling that it's all meaningless. Maybe I'm just tuning in to the sense of meaninglessness that most human beings suffer at least once in their lives, and the despair that goes along with it. That's the worst of all." He was nodding his head.
"And it makes no sense for me to be feeling that way, because if there's anything I'm certain of, Adam, it's what the psychedelics taught me: that everything - every damned thing - in the universe is intensely meaningful!"
I told him about Shura, "He's always there for me, giving me love and being supportive and reassuring, but I worry about his tuning in too much, hurting for me -"
"You can't change that," said Adam, firmly, "It isn't possible to love someone without sharing some grief, now and then; you have to stop trying to protect everybody else. People who love you will try to help - and they can't - and they'll hurt for you, just as you would for them. And you wouldn't want it any other way, you know! But you can remind Shura of something that'll help him keep his boundaries, and that's the same thing you told me: that somewhere in your soul, you know everything's all right."
"Yes, I have told him that. I guess I can repeat it, now and then, to remind him." "Good."
"Why does this kind of process have to be so hard, Adam? Everything hurts a little bit, all the time."
He replied, "I don't know why it hurts, but I know it does." "What I need help with is - well, I don't know what to do with all this, where to go with it. What am I supposed to be doing7"
" told you on the phone," he said, "That this is a process, and the only thing you can do is not get in its way - don't try to direct it, don't try to explain it - just let it be, and learn as much as you can." I heard the sound of breath whistling out from between my teeth.
"Whatever is happening," he continued, "Has to happen, and right now all you can do is experience it. Understanding is for later. Maybe. It's possible you may never completely understand it, but believe me when I tell you that whatever is going on is necessary -
necessary to who you're going to be - otherwise it wouldn't be happening. Don't censor it.
You'll do your darnedest to get away from it -"
"Like the MDMA experiment. It worked, for a while."
"Yes. For a while. One day's vacation, you called it. By now, I think you realize that this process is going to do its thing, whatever that is, and you may as well go with it and stop wasting energy fighting it."
I was silent for a moment, thinking. Then I sighed and asked him, "Is there a name for this -?
Aside from 'psychosis,' that is?"
"Sure - lots of names. Psychosis is not among them, by the way. Names don't matter."
"But it helps, Adam, it helps to give it a name - any name! Not the wrong one, of course," I added quickly, "But it would be something to hold onto; it would give me some of my power back, to be able to name it."
"Okay. If it helps you, fine. Just don't take names seriously, don't let them limit your experience. So let's give it a name. The right one. It's called a spiritual crisis."
I burst out laughing, "But everything's a spiritual crisis, Adam! Life's a spiritual crisis!"
He smiled, "Nonetheless, that's what it's called, and it's hell. It's one of the toughest things anyone can go through, but someday you'll be grateful for it. You'll be glad it happened.
Believe me. I know."
I ble
w my nose. Then his words registered, and I looked up, "Did you ever go through anything like this, yourself?"
He sat back in his chair and took a moment before answering, "I lived through something very similar for two whole years."
"Oh, Lord, no! Two years of this? When?"
"Oh, about twenty years ago. I was around fifty-something, I think."
"What happened? How did you get out of it?"
"I guess you could say I just outlived it. But there was at least one time when, if I'd had a gun, I would probably have used it on myself. The pain was that bad. Everything hurt, all the time."
I nodded in recognition. I asked, "Did you have anyone to go to, to help you get through it?"
"No one. I tried to sign myself into mental hospital, at one point. I had to drive one of my patients up to a hospital in Sonoma and after he was taken care of, I looked around and figured I needed to be in there as much as he did, so I asked if I could sign myself in for a couple of days. They said no. Wouldn't take me." I grimaced in sympathy. "I found myself thinking just that, today - how nice it would be to tuck myself into a safe quiet room in a hospital or a retreat, some place where I wouldn't have to deal with anybody else, or worry about affecting anyone else, until this was all over with."
Adam nodded, "As a matter of fact, that's what I finally did. I drove to a monastery in the hills, a Catholic monastery, and told them I was a Jew who was having some kind of trouble in his soul, and just needed isolation until what I was going through was resolved, and would they let me stay there for a while. They took me in and gave me a clean, quiet little room and plain good meals and left me alone. I suppose they were keeping an eye on me, but they didn't intrude; they just gave me what I asked for. It saved my life."
"How long did you stay there?"
"About a month, I think. I lost track of time. Which was part of what I needed to do, probably.
I stayed until I knew that whatever had been crippling me was finally beginning to heal; the psychic noise was calming down, and I was able to function without feeling as if I was bleeding from every pore."
"How terrible that you didn't have an Adam Fisher to help you, as I do!"
"Funny thing is, 1 was in analysis at the time, with Phil Wilkerson -" I smiled. Dr. Wilkerson was a friend of my ex-husband, a fellow Jungian analyst.
"- and I stopped by the side of the road on my way back from getting chucked out of the hospital in Sonoma, and phoned him. He didn't have Idea One about what to do." He chuckled, "Well, the truth is, no one can do much for you while it's happening. It's a solitary journey, like being born and dying."
I protested, "But you've helped me immensely - just the few words you said that day on the phone were exactly the right words, and it means more to me than I can tell you, to be able to talk to somebody who knows the territory."
"That's exactly it. Only someone who's been there and come through it can help, just a little.
Poor Phil had never been there. I suppose that's why I've spent a lot of my life since then doing what I do - being here for people who are making this kind of journey, letting them know they're not completely alone. And that they aren't in the least crazy."
Before I left his little apartment, with its photographs of children and friends crowding the mantel of the small fireplace, and shelves of books and manuscripts lining the walls, Adam took the tape out of the recorder and handed it to me, saying, "Phone me any time and come over whenever you need to. I'll be here."
We hugged each other silently. Driving home on the highway was not frightening and didn't feel dangerous. In the middle of the usual rush-hour slowdown on the western side of the Caldicott Tunnel, an interesting thought came to me that, if I tried, I could almost get a glimpse of what it would be like to be a whole, integrated human being. For a moment, as my car edged along at two miles an hour with the rest of the rats, I moved into a state of being at peace, strongly centered, and accepting of everything around and inside me. There was, for that brief time, a sense of having immense, singing energy, and something that felt like light, radiating from a place just above my navel.
My Observer reminded me not to stay distracted for too long, since I was still behind the wheel of a car.
Late that night, when Shura came home from the club, I told him that I'd actually managed to drive to Berkeley and see Adam, and that I would tell him all about it, but not until tomorrow.
In bed, I finally admitted that I was still made of wood where it counted, and he said that if this did turn out to be a permanent new state of consciousness, we would have to work at redirecting some of the energy back into this place and that, and he illustrated with fingertips, in case I had forgotten. I laughed and kissed him goodnight.
As we settled on our pillows, I let myself become open, as before, to the different layers of feeling inside Shura. On top, there was a quiet concern; underneath that, I felt a place in him that was picking up the ever-present hurting, the chafed-raw feeling, the urgent tumbling of ideas and emotions, and knew that he was trying not to be too receptive to all of it, for the sake of both of us. Beneath all the rest was a layer of serenity, a certainty that everything was all right, that whatever I was going through was meant to happen and would resolve itself. I fell asleep locked into that part of him, at one with it.
During the early morning hours, I found myself conscious again in my sleep, aware that I was dreaming and being shown what had to be learned. What I saw this time were two doors, side by side in a high wall. One was painted red, the other yellow. The lesson was the same as that of the first lucid dream. The doors were the Great Duality in yet another form. The red color on the left slowly changed places with the yellow on the right, and changed back, over and over again, until I became impatient, standing there watching, and finally said, "I already know this one, if you don't mind. It's beginning to get boring."
The doors continued their slow exchange of colors.
I sighed, and addressed whoever might be directing this repetitive scenario. I admitted that I didn't yet know how I was going to come to terms with what I was being shown, but did believe it was a truth I had to accept and assimilate. I promised I would not try to postpone or escape dealing with it, and I suggested - this time with respect, with humbleness - that it had gone on long enough, already, and could we maybe have another slide, please?
I was ignored. The teaching continued until I woke up.
FRIDAY
Shura got ready to leave for work, promising to come home as early as he could manage. I said I would be fine, that things were feeling a mite better, inside, less bumpy, less frantic, maybe starting to mellow out a bit. I added, "I hope you've noticed that my cheeks are dry, today?"
"Well, that's fine, but I love you either way - wet or dry!"
I grinned and we kissed goodbye.
I spent most of the day writing. The pain-haze had faded, and the intensity of the thought-streams seemed to gentle and stay subdued, as long as I kept typing. I was determined to put down every detail I could recall of the week's experiences, and I broke stride only for the time it took to fix myself a tomato sandwich for lunch.
I wrote:
"I have been shown, twice now in lucid dreams, that my resistance to the destructive, killer aspect of the Great Duality must change. I don't know yet if that means an acceptance of only the archetype, the primal energy or force, or whether I must learn to accept all its manifestations, including the evil and repugnant ones.
"Is it simply a matter of understanding and assenting to the basic rule of opposition as a necessity for life - water crashing against shore, the continual reshaping of the skin of the planet by earthquakes, the body fighting for survival against bacteria and viruses - and recognizing that, for life to continue on all levels - animal, human and vegetable - adaptation is vital, and adaptation requires change, which comes about as a response to challenge?
"I can accept, in the deepest part of myself, the existence of aggressive power and destructio
n as a necessary force in the service of life, but some of its manifestations - especially in the human world - still seem to me evil, wrong, and unacceptable. That's where I run into serious trouble, because my human instincts say no, and I keep being in opposition, heart and soul, to the dark and terrible elaborations on the theme that the human race seems to be constantly creating. "I can continue to love my cat, even when I see, over and over, the game it plays with the mouse - and since our cats are outside cats and excellent hunters, I've seen it often, because they bring their mice to the patio outside the dining room for the final stages - and Shura's explanation of how the teasing is part of a cat's honing of its hunting skills makes sense.
"The cat has been programmed to exercise her power this way, and it may well be that Nature has made the game satisfying on the emotional level, too - in other words, she enjoys the feeling of power and the mouse's fear - because if it were not satisfying emotionally, the cat would not pursue the activity, and the result might well be that her skills would lose their edge, thus potentially threatening her survival.
"But I have trouble with human cruelty, the enjoyment of another person's pain and fear. I have a hard time believing that it serves human life, as it does the animal's. Besides, it seems to me that human cruelty does not arise from natural survival programming, but is the result of having experienced powerlessness - having been victimized by the cruelty of others, as a child - and having had available as models only the kinds of grownups who take power away from others, people who have never developed their capacity for caring and empathy.
"The whole terrible business of victimized child growing into victimizing adult is, to me, a tragic, twisted, stunted perversion of what should have been. And what should have been, of course, was a free, validated flowering of the child into a fully integrated member of the human family. I see such a taking away of another's power to self-affirm as an evil thing, and I believe in my heart and soul that, while I am incarnated as a human being, I am supposed to make choices - the right ones - between that dark element in my own soul and the loving, yea-saying part of myself. The making of those choices, consciously and unconsciously, over and over again - in small daily matters as well as in important, big ones - is what gives me my individual shape, what makes me the person I am, and eventually -1 hope - the person I want to become.
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